Ascension, by Nicholas Binge, Harper Collins Pseudoscience stuff’s good clean fun, right? Why shouldn’t the world’s crust just ripple up and accelerate the movement of land masses like Pangea, Gondwanaland and Pannotia to a couple of million years rather than the eons we thought? Authors like Graeme Hancock, and more than few psycho creation scientists, […]
WATCHING Parliament the other night got me to thinking of the Peruvian jungle, of headhunters and, given the cranial magnitude evident in Canberra, the Amazonians’ skills in shrinking heads. Not the psychiatric head-shrinking, mind you there’s probably a job there, but the real thing _ the secret savage lore that’s fascinated everyone from anthropologists to […]
Never fail to be appalled by the time-worn old adage that you get the kind of justice you can afford. Should never be that way but time and time again we see justice dispensed like an insurance company’s write-off car crash assessment. Too much to fix, car’s not worth that much, cut your losses all […]
Above: Brendan Gleeson as Colm Doherty in The Banshees of Inisherin. Met the great Irish musician Paddy Moloney, leader of the legendary Chieftains, years back backstage at Dallas Brooks Hall. I was with another Irish legend, Melbourne’s Paddy O’Neill, who ushered me past a scowling bull of a security guard with a thumb over his […]
Remarkable to see the angst, stupidity, arrogance, and vengeful and avaricious behaviours attached to the Higgins/Lehrmann rape case. Not to mention the miserable failure of the judicial system to uphold either itself or the individual’s basic rights. Feral. The whole lot of it, start to unresolved finish. Nothing in there to really flatter anyone involved […]
It’s a while back now but I can still well remember when I spent almost every working night talking with media lawyers. Checking stories for potential defamatory comment, police and court reports for sub judice and contempt of court issues, suppression orders. Might need to check every so often that weren’t scandalising parliament. Yeah, it’s […]
Was a time when poetry was the last thing held any interest for this word-mangler. Too esoteric, too flowery, concepts too emotional and hard to plumb. More times than not, too cathartic and revealing. Hadn’t poets something better to do than sit around all introspective, navel-gazing and self-pitying? Who needs need to know their innermost […]
Poring over some old holey dollars recently. Not the real thing, unfortunately. Rather, some slick website images of the real thing. At up to $500K apiece, you want something that looks pretty schmick. Dripping with history, strange tangible aspect to them, intriguing artwork, high-end corporate nature to them. Hard not to love these things. Well […]
The Island, by Adrian McKinty, Hachette Australia Takes a fair leap of faith to convince yourself the premise for this story might reasonably be able to happen. It’s far-fetched and unrealistic but if you think people like Ivan Milat and Bear Grylls can exist then the leap into its treachery, cruelty and heroics isn’t so […]
Okay, so what came first, the chicken or the egg? How about the dinosaur? Well, so science seems to suggest, and largely the fault of a cute little critter jackhammered out of cliffs near Apollo Bay 30 years back. This came to mind when I learned an ancient Jan Juc whale is in the running […]
